Journalist Writes About Discovering She'd Been Surveilled By TikTok (arstechnica.com) 37
An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Financial Times, written by journalist Cristina Criddle: One evening in late December last year, I received a cryptic phone call from a PR director at TikTok, the popular social media app. I'd written extensively about the company for the Financial Times, so we'd spoken before. But it was puzzling to hear from her just before the holidays, especially since I wasn't working on anything related to the company at the time. The call lasted less than a minute. She wanted me to know, "as a courtesy," that The New York Times had just published a story I ought to read. Confused by this unusual bespoke news alert, I asked why. But all she said was that it concerned an inquiry at ByteDance, TikTok's Chinese parent company, and that I should call her back once I'd read it.
The story claimed ByteDance employees accessed two reporters' data through their TikTok accounts. Personal information, including their physical locations, had been used as part of an attempt to find the writers' sources, after a series of damaging stories about ByteDance. According to the report, two employees in China and two in the US left the company following an internal investigation. In a staff memo, ByteDance's chief executive lamented the incident as the "misconduct of a few individuals." When I phoned the PR director back, she confirmed I was one of the journalists who had been surveilled. I put down my phone and wondered what it meant that a company I reported on had gone to such lengths to restrict my ability to do so. Over the following months, the episode became just one in a long series of scandals and crises that call into question what TikTok really is and whether the company has the world-dominating future that once seemed inevitable.
The story claimed ByteDance employees accessed two reporters' data through their TikTok accounts. Personal information, including their physical locations, had been used as part of an attempt to find the writers' sources, after a series of damaging stories about ByteDance. According to the report, two employees in China and two in the US left the company following an internal investigation. In a staff memo, ByteDance's chief executive lamented the incident as the "misconduct of a few individuals." When I phoned the PR director back, she confirmed I was one of the journalists who had been surveilled. I put down my phone and wondered what it meant that a company I reported on had gone to such lengths to restrict my ability to do so. Over the following months, the episode became just one in a long series of scandals and crises that call into question what TikTok really is and whether the company has the world-dominating future that once seemed inevitable.
people have no idea (Score:5, Insightful)
People have no idea what techies have access to as part of their job and how easy it can be to abuse that access.
Re: people have no idea (Score:5, Interesting)
What I find hilarious is knowing that things like this are what Facebook was created for, yet we condemn tiktok for it while Facebook gets away with this all the time.
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It's not the employees who face possible termination, it's the reporters... ala Jamal Khashoggi.
Re: people have no idea (Score:3)
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FACEBOOK still REMAINS ACCOUNTABLE TO THE GOVERNMENTS WHERE IT OPERATES AND RESIDES. TIKTOK HAS NO SUCH ACCOUNTABILITY.
Why are people so fucking bad at coherent thought?
EDIT: No shit capitalization is like yelling, Slashdot. Christ this site is now even for dumb people.
Re: people have no idea (Score:2)
Well, your account has been here aspartame for around 10 years so I question the idea that it's just now happening...
Re: people have no idea (Score:2)
I hate my phone. :[
Re: people have no idea (Score:4, Insightful)
Mainly all that sensitive data social media companies collect about you is *supposed* to be for sorting you into buckets to be targeted with advertising. While this involves collecting potentially sensitive personal information, the *purpose* of that collection is not really personal. It's grist for an algorithmic mill. *Using* that data in a way that *personally* targets people is a no-no.
In IT professional ethics, any time potentially sensitive data is *repurposed* for anything other than what it was collected for, that should be a trigger to review what you are doing for potential harm to the subject and legal exposure for the company. Examing someone's data to see if the system is making sound recommendations on advertising is probably OK, because that's part of making the system work. Poking around in someone's data because you're interested in *them* is usually unethical, and possibly illegal in certain places. Gathering *intel* on a corporate critic using data collected to feed them advertising should be obviously unethical to anyone, and is probably a bigger risk to the company than any unkind words they might say about you.
Of course those data-repurposing red flags are routinely ignored. You have to assume that companies will abuse their access to your data until they get in trouble. In fact more companies did get in trouble, that would be a very good thing.
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all that sensitive data social media companies collect about you is *supposed* to be for sorting you into buckets to be targeted with advertising.
Except facebook actually does that by tagging content, and then copying the same tags to your profile when you interact with the content. They literally don't need anything else but your content interaction history to classify you the way they do. Go into the advertising prefs and check your "interests" and you will laugh and laugh. Remove them all, and they'll all be back in less than a month. Anyone who thinks they're getting targeted advertising from Faceboot is a chucklefuck. They MIGHT be able to actua
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Lucky Team America World Police aren't interested in world domination...
It's also lucky, but not ironically this time, that Chinese emit far less CO2 than Americans.
What would happen if Chinese people were like Americans in both aspects?
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They are. They are just that incompetent as a country. Gunpowder, writing, culture... all of that wasted on internal squabbles.
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Well, the difference between facebook and tiktok is that facebook is controlled by americans and tiktok is controlled by chinese. Ask yourself if push came to shove, would you rather be tried in a US court, or a Chinese court.
It's not that the information is being gathered, it's how it's being used. For example, consider the Chinese police stations around the US.
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Given companies with no concern for privacy, true. On the other hand, it's not hard to design systems where abuse is logged, flagged and acted upon. It doesn't seem to happen much without a government that will really hurt a company if you don't, though. Needless to say, China isn't known for being protective of anyone's privacy (I guess with the exemption of members of government).
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I used to work at a state Health & Welfare department. Folks would call all the time for password resets and they'd be logged into a system that had information I should never have access to. BUT we also had a system that a person requested security access through so all that was audited and information access was audited. Because state law about agencies.
Private companies are not bound by those same strictures.
Also, if you have tiktok installed, you're a mindless idiot. Anyone with any semblance of
A real journalist? (Score:1)
Or just another Western apparatchik?
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There's a difference?
Should have known better (Score:5, Interesting)
Anyone who is as plugged in and aware as a Financial Times reporter should be, should have expected this and taken precautions. If what happened here is a surprise to Ms Criddle, she has no business reporting on anything in the tech sector because she lacks the insight and deductive capabilities to do the job. Hell, there might even be an argument that her ability to consume and interpret news stories is questionable.
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Absolutely, you're quite right. But that's not the big story here.
Five or Six weeks ago, Tiktok's CEO testified before congress. I don't think he was asked directly about his, but he certainly gave the impression as far as I'm aware that they would never even dream of stalking journalists, and afterwards the world loved him.
In Soviet United States, Jokes Come to You (Score:1)
> Journalist Writes About Discovering She'd Been Surveilled By TikTok
Wait until she finds out what the US government does.
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Or Google. Or Meta. Or all the others.
Ban Chinese Software (Score:1)
China has banned all western social media apps, search engines, and news websites. Hundreds of billions of dollars worth of software are pirated by Chinese users every year.
Yet, we allow TikTok and the millions of China origin apps on Android and Apple stores with no limits. Ban all Chinese and Russian software now. All software controlled by authoritarian regimes are unplugged security risks.
Re: Ban Chinese Software (Score:1)
Re: Ban Chinese Software (Score:2)
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Regressive totalitarian regimes have everything to fear from open media apps.
The reverse is not true. All we have to fear from TikTok are an occasional handful of extremely stupid teenagers committing crimes against property in order to fit in with dumb trending topics.
No matter what the right wing and fringe far-lefties want so desperately for you to believe, the United States is not a totalitarian regime.
We allow theirs because we are better than they are.
Hewlett-Packard, News Corp (Score:4, Insightful)
Hewlett-Packard and Murdoch's News Corp are two entities that have gone to great lengths to surveil journalists. No reason why New Media shouldn't take similar actions right? /s
What's TikTok? (Score:2)
Why did the two employees in China leave? (Score:4, Interesting)
Haven't we been told multiple times that China-based staff don't have access to the data of US-based people?
Absolutely explosive (Score:2)
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Yes, long-enough to tell each other about a new social network (web-site) that is better than twitter/tumblr/facebook and NSA-approved.
This nothing new (Score:2)
Read this story [volkskrant.nl] (it is in English) of Chinese intimidation tactics.